OURS LOCALIZATION GROUP

If you are new to localization, tags and placeholders are usually the first thing that makes you hesitate. They interrupt the sentence, look technical, and make you wonder whether touching them will break something. That hesitation makes sense. Tags and placeholders look like text, but they do a very different job. What Tags and Placeholders Actually Look Like Placeholders are pieces of text that get replaced later by the system. They often look like this: {username} %s or %1

When translation issues come up, language is often blamed first. But in practice, many problems have nothing to do with how well someone knows the source or target language. They come from workflow gaps, unclear processes, or the way tools are used. For freelancers especially, these mistakes can sneak in quietly and cause more trouble than obvious mistranslations. Starting Without Enough Context One of the most common mistakes is jumping straight into translation without aski

If you work with CAT tools, you have probably seen numbers like 100%, 95%, or 82% next to a segment. These match percentages come from translation memory and indicate how closely a sentence matches something translated before. Over time, it is easy to trust those numbers a bit too much. A 100% match feels safe. A high fuzzy match looks like a quick win. But match percentages only describe similarity. They do not indicate whether a previous translation should be reused without

Consistency is one of those things everyone agrees is important, but few people define clearly. It often gets reduced to “use the same word every time,” which sounds simple but misses the point. In real translation work, consistency is about helping the reader move through the text without stopping to question whether something has changed. Consistency Starts with Key Terms Most consistency issues show up around terminology. When the same concept is translated in different wa